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9 Feb

Ep. 25 – Brian Pontarelli – Founder of Inversoft – How To Pursue Your Dreams Without Quitting Your Job

Brian Pontarelli –  Founder of Inversoft; How to Pursue Your Dream Job Without Quitting Your Day Job; Strapped For Cash? No Problem; Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping; When to Rebuild

Segment 1: (Length :05:00) – General Updates; Introduction to Brian Pontarelli and his background; Introduction to Inversoft;

Brian’s finer points:

“That was about 8 years ago. I just kind of clawed along taking this idea of content filtering and just learning the lessons.”

“Profanity is a problem. Brands don’t want to have profanity in their forums or in their games. From there, we grew CleanSpeak into this kids management safety realm. Then the more people came to talk to us about CleanSpeak, the more they revealed they really just want to manager their users.”

“We sat down and saw that CleanSpeak is pretty mature. We’ve got a lot of great customers using it. How can we expand Inversoft and get into a much larger market? So we looked around and we saw that there were some needs for better forums.”

Segment 2: (Length :07:00) – Talking with Brian Pontarelli; Building a company at the same as working another job;

Brian’s finer points:

“I was in Chicago. I would take the bus, open up my laptop and start coding. I’d get home from Orbitz, or the startup I was working at and just start coding. I had to force myself not to turn on the Cubs game, not to open up Netflix. Same thing on the weekends.”

“I knew the list of tasks I had to accomplish to get everything launched and make money on this. It was pretty long to do with a day job. For me it was a lot about focus and buckling down and not slack off wasting time in front of the tube.”

“It took about 6-8 months and then I had a prototype; an MVP. I launched the website, got it up and running and started slowly making sales. I was clawing at it and trying to figure out how to make it work. But I didn’t quit my day job.” 

Segment 3: (Length :07:00)Let’s talk about bootstrapping when you’re strapped For Cash; Staffing

Brian’s finer points:

Managing your finances – Keys to think about

  1. Don’t quit your day job until it’s the right time.
  2. Look at what’s coming in from your product. If you can make about half of your yearly salary of what you’re currently making, then you can start thinking about quitting your day job.
  3. It’s not overnight and you’re not going to be making enough money to hire people. It takes time.
  4. You have skills so you could also find other contracts you can work on. Maybe take an extra 20 hours per week to help others. Use your network to continue to make money while you’re still growing.

“You can build a great company without a dime of your investment.”

“We staffed up and got up to 7 or 8 employees. It’s hard because you’re still doing a lot of the work yourself. You’re wearing 12 different hats. You’re expecting everybody to do the same thing, which can lead to a lot of conflict.”

“You can’t really have layers of management because you’re too small of an organization . . . We ended up having a few people that just didn’t fit. They weren’t really into the mindset of building a company. They wanted layers of management. Then the culture imploded and I became the bad guy. It melted down. I learned a lot about culture from that.”

“I took the time to slowly hire. I found a good executive to help me. I did it slowly and methodically to make sure I could hire the right people so we don’t run into culture problems.”

Segment 4: (Length :03:00) – Hustler Thought of the Day:

“You have to mentally prepare yourself to fail forward, work more hours than your regular 9 to 5 job and prepared that it will take time to gain momentum. But you will gain momentum.” – Tony & Carmen Matthew’s (SuperFly Magazine).

Brian’s finer points:

“You’ve got to work the hours. You might have to wake up in the middle of the night to do calls. You have to constantly be brainstorming. The 9 to 5 is not in the cards for an entrepreneur.”

“When things come up, everyone wants to bail cause it’s hard, but the entrepreneur learns a ton of experience from it and charges forward.”

GENERAL NOTES:

Brian Pontarelli – Founder of Inversoft

  • Brian is responsible for overseeing the direction and vision for the company.
  • He splits his time between development, sales, marketing and finance.
  • With over 14 years of experience in the software industry, Brian has a deep technical and management experience with a range of companies including BEA, US Freightways, Orbitz, Texturemedia and Naymz.
  • Inversoft’s Mission – Their products bring brands closer together.
  • CleanSpeak – Reduce User Attrition, prevent PR disasters and potential lawsuits, filter out offensive content, moderate users quickly.
  • Passport – Get your application to market fast by reducing development time. Adds registration, login, single sign-on, reporting and powerful user management for applications.
  • Gather – Increase Sales & LTV by engaging users directly. Build the ultimate online community. Have discussions, answer questions, create polls, generate surveys and more.

 

 

Matt Gottesman

Matt Gottesman is a global digital strategist and technology advisor, creator and editor-in-chief of Hustle & Deal Flow™ - an online magazine dedicated to the world's entrepreneurs, creators and makers, a Social Media Influencer and a consultant on New Media and go-to-market strategies for investments in digital marketing, technology, websites, mobile applications, eCommerce, social media and content.

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